Why Don’t Large Retailers Accept Bitcoin?

Why aren’t large retailers like Walmart and Amazon accepting bitcoin as payment? The whole point of the bitcoin initiative was the decentralize currency (making it less dependant on the global economy and more stable in general) and offer super low transaction fees – two things large retailers should love. So why aren’t they chomping at the bit to accept?

Because it takes too long to process payment – that’s why. Bitcoin transactions can only be processed at a rate of 2-3 per second, threatening systems that offer them as payment. Since bitcoin miners (users who provide the computing power for the network) choose which transactions to process, transactions with a higher cost now have a much better chance to go through… so your $14.99 sock pack from Walmart bought with BitCoin will likely never make it to the front of the queue.